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| Morphogenesis Morphogenesis is an experimental and pioneer project that hybridizes electronic art, interactive dance, virtual architecture and electro-acoustics. It consists of an interactive dance performance with sound, video and 3-D images produced and processed in real time through movements of the body that are captured by a video camera and uploaded to a computer for analysis in real time. The dancer’s voice is processed in real time, spaced out among four independent channels which create a constantly transforming sound space, in which the sounds move in relation to the body’s movements. The picture of the dancer is also processed, through the abstract visual discourse of abstract cinema. Likewise, pre-recorded video images are processed with a context of abstract cinema and experimental narrative. Three-dimensional images enter the world of sculpture and a virtual architecture that is interactive and generative. First, some 3-D abstract models transform themselves in real time as a “duo” with the dancer, responding to her movements. Then, a trail and particles are formed as result, and space is dissolved in pictorial matter. The poetic and textual foundation of the piece is equally as abstract, with fragments appearing and disappearing, dissolved into the sound landscape. These are pieces of poems (appearing at the end of the program) and fragmented resonances of the body. The dancer-performer appears with tenuous lighting achieved by gauze over a projector that shows images of her that she herself generates interactively. This is ultimately the only stage. The shape of the body is diluted in the semi-darkness and turns into an abstract hybrid, with the field of signifiers and signifieds opening up. Basically, this performance is a series of studies of a post human or amplified body, a discourse on the boundary of representation. This discourse deals with the hybrids of language and the disciplines arising both from new technologies and from the amplified body (the body as hyper-instrument) when discourse opens outward and body and matter are seen as an uncertain process of representation that is never concluded. In Morphogenesis, shapes are never specified, both in terms of gestures and choreography and the visual and sound components. Instead, it all remains at the disconcerting boundary area, where one questions the ability to have any objective perception of reality, and where shapes are made and re-made. These are the silent landscapes of the body, landscapes of the reverse which “speak” at the boundary of intelligibility, where excesses in language turns into language, at the risk of falling into a realm of the unpronounceable. Morphogenesis is a term originally used in biology to define processes of organ formation in organisms at birth. In Morphogenesis, shapes are never finished and the sequences are not defined structural elements, but thin swaying lines in a process of sedimentation. There are no organs in the piece, but rather, “anti-organs” of a body as hyper-instrument that is never finished, a process with multiple time dimensions. Specific sound and image software was developed for Morphogenesis. The total combination of software, hardware, space, light and body compose the instrument complex. Morphogenesis is the process of building, tuning and learning about this instrument, an improvisation whose final sediment is the performance. It requires reconsidering the processes of meaning, writing, and language formation in a hybrid and technological context; It also questions the boundaries between disciplines and bodies. The result is not only a mutation of language, but above all, an opening up of language. We no longer have the closed relationship between symbols and meaning of verbal language, but an open horizon of associations and relationships between planes of meaning whose boundaries undraw themselves, a meta-language or language of language, and a meta-body that constitutes it. The performance (which in the future will also be presented as a set of interactive and on-line installations) is part of a project called “Reverse-Boundary Bodies” which studies the relationship between the body, art and technology. “Reverse” Discourse/“Boundary” Discourse “What must remain unpronounceable in order for contemporary discourse systems to continue exercising their power? Implicit censorship produces discourse systems through the production of unpronounceables. A person who speaks from the boundary of pronounceability assumes the risk of redrawing the distinction between what is and what is not pronounceable, and the risk of being expelled to the realm of the unpronounceable. There is no possible opposition to the lines traced by exclusion, except to redraw those lines. . . .” (Judith Butler, “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency”, Excitable Speech, Routledge, New York, 1995) A theory of morphogenesis identifies matter, shape, the body, and language as processes of meaning that never conclude, processes in which the boundary between what is and is not shape, body, matter, and concrete reality is not a thin line, but rather a wide area; a landscape of unstable and unpredictable events where the line between inside and outside of the discourse is constantly moving. Concrete and abstract are therefore two unstable signifiers in an implicit violent struggle for power marked by a genealogy of phallo-logocentrism. The western logic of logos, shape, and objective reality has traced this imaginary divisive line between concrete reality and that which exceeds it and which it cannot dominate, therefore rejecting it. “Thus, there is an “outside” to discourse, but it is not an absolute one that circumscribes the discursive boundaries as an ontological place. The constitutive “outside” is that which can only be thought about (if possible) in relationship to discourse, as its unstable boundary.” (Judith Butler, “Bodies that Matter”, Routledge, New York, 1993) The constitutive outside of discourse is as unreachable as its inside. Its laws clash violently on the boundary, where the mirror that looks at itself in a mirror is broken into infinite facets that weave the abyss. There is nothing at the bottom of this abyss except fragmented reflections that create the fine networks, a spider web suspended in the abyss. When the clash is too strong and the laws make the mirror’s surface explode into lost fragments, unable to reflect the law at any point, it then falls sideways into the outside and is rejected as so-called craziness. When the clash hardly breaks the mirror looking at itself in a mirror, then the inside is apparently absorbing and the subject conforms to the laws and unquestioningly builds his small shelter. When the clash in all its violence does not impede the mirror fragments from suspending themselves, interwoven in the abyss, bridges made with other mirrors, violent artists, fragmented images in which the Law can only be reflected partially or through conflict – here is where boundary discourse and body-boundaries can arise. All bodies are body boundaries but only those that know how to claim this status can house the strategic place that boundaries offer, where inside and outside are constantly redrawn. This is a diffuse line since there is no perspective that can describe it or encompass it entirely; it is multiple and inside this multiplicity its points are moving. For each perspective at each point there is a different point which oscillates at the boundary. Boundary discourse knows that there is no inside or outside; it opens the windows once closed in an imagined inside to an outside that is illusion and horizon, anxiety and watchfulness, eagerness and violence, a suspended present. Boundary discourse also redraws the boundaries of things, knitting new strings in the great spider web. “The body does not merely act according to certain regularized practices, the body is that sedimented ritual activity. . . . However, the body is not only the sedimentation of speech acts that have formed it. If this constitution fails, the appeal runs into resistance as soon as it is made. Thus, something goes beyond the appeal and this excess is experienced as the outside of intelligibility. This seems clear in the way the body goes beyond the speech act that it makes. . . . “ (Judith Butler, “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency”, Excitable Speech) Language is excess. It cannot be understood except through all that which exceeds it. In its excess, language opens up, oscillates, and shows its vulnerability. It is reborn on the boundary. There are many languages and many boundaries of each language. Each of these is a large oscillating area. In fact, language is boundary, the body is boundary, everything is boundary. Everything is excess and in all excess there lives a boundary. “It would seem then, that our task is to force modern terms to include that which it has traditionally excluded. . . . This is not a simple assimilation of and accommodation to excluded matter in existing terms, rather it means that we admit the sense of difference and future in the modernity that an unknown future offers - modernity in which its functions cannot be predictable, one that assumes an equally unpredictable political future. At the same time this will be a policy of hope and anxiety, which Foucault called “politics of the uncomfortable”. (Judith Butler, “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency”, Excitable Speech, Routledge, New York, 1995) Moreover, boundary discourse is also a discourse of reverse and resistance. There are clear lines fixed which are wild and imprecise, a changing law, a horizon of powers in alliance that mark an “inside” space. These lines do not listen to events from the boundary. Their power is implicit and their validity lies in shape. Anything which is considered matter, which can have a coherent shape, lives in the inside. The rest, in the non-existent outside. The power struggle over redrawing the line is complex and fought on many fronts. Let us now speak of undrawing it: Undraw the thin line that outlines a boundary in a uniform and flat way, fade it and stretch it until it encompasses everything, until the uncertain horizon of events is cast off. This means inoculating the body of shape with an antibody that prevents it from becoming totally concrete. The phallo-logocentric universe is a universe of shape. Anything that assumes an objective status may be tamed by the laws of shape and by technologies of a serialized industry that lives off of everything presenting a codifiable pattern. We, the boundary bodies, speak a language of the outside that shouts against this industry, a shout that goes unheard. |
